Soil Savvy Soil Test Kits - Two Tests

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Last week in the post about how I had bought my first run of Humic Acid (granular), I mentioned that I was going to test my soil before applying.  Welp, today is that day.  I bought two Soil Savvy Soil Test Kits after watching Ryan Knorr on YouTube talk about how to collect a sample.   There are a variety of ways you can test your soil including a few that you can buy at Menards and mix up on the spot, but this test is priced a bit higher, requires you to send away a sample and the posts some online results for you. 

So, why two?  You can probably imagine that I'd want to get a test from my front yard and my back.  But, you'd be wrong.  When we built our house, the entire front yard was a massive mud pit.  And so was the back.  For about the first 100 feet.  And that's where we laid sod.  Based on the soil type in our landscape beds, I'm pretty sure that everywhere there is sod, there's a lot of terrible clay soil.  The front and the back (first 100 feet) were graded by the landscapers and sod applied to them. 

So, I'm using one test for those.  I collected two samples from the front yard and two from the close-in backyard where there is sod.  Put those four samples into a cup and mixed them up.  And took a scoop out of that cup that I think is a good representative sample of the recently graded soil.

The other test I am using for the back few hundred feet of our property.  This is where we have undisturbed soil from pre-construction and grass that is remaining from before we bought the property.  Same thing here...I collected from two spots and combined them.

A few days ago, I mailed the samples off and now I wait.  Wait to see the results posted online.  I don't know why...but I'm excited.  I've been treating my entire property the same way:  running the same fertilizer out in equal amounts.  But even in collecting the samples with a plugger, I've now realized that the soils are very different.  So is the grass.  Where we have sod, there's a thick layer of thatch and it is much harder to press the plugger in the ground.  In the back? Goes in easy.  And there's hardly any thatch. 

Will the tests come back differently?  I'm guessing so.  And that means that I can treat the two areas differently.  One needs more of something?  I can be thoughtful about addressing the specific needs. 

I'll, of course, post the test results.  Stay tuned for those.

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